Please Filter the World

Paradoxically (a word that describes almost everything in the universe), portals -- an electronic opening to the rest of the world  -- do just the opposite. I filter my portals by selecting what I get to see when I open my portal and my email, whether it's Yahoo or AOL. The portal has become my suit of armor, my battlement, and my nuclear shield.

So this past week, with conflicts ablaze in the Middle East, a guy blowing up his townhouse in NYC so his divorced wife couldn't seize it, and media and money moguls confabulating with tech moguls at a private retreat in Idaho, I just kept my nose to the grindstone and ignored mainstream media. To me what's happening in the Middle East is similar to what happened with the townhouse in NYC --  it's an if I can't have it, I'll blow it up kind of philosophy. And if I were a technologist, I'd stay away from the media and money barons because you know they'll blow up whatever tech wonders you've created  if they can't have it their way.

I did get interviewed by the San Jose Mercury News (old media) about why I've kept my AOL account for so long. Mainly, it's because I have a cool email address (whoisylvia) and it's easy to use,  but then as I discovered today while trying to get RSS feeds for various sites and blogs on my AOL account, there is no way to do this ...even by searching the HELP list. So AOL is more like a moat than a portal.

And I did go to a party for a new nonprofit called Full Circle started by a founder of PayPal who wants to pay all his pals back. The party was at the former mansion of SF Mayor Gavin Newsom and former wife Kimberly Guilfoyle on top of a hill in Pacific Heights overlooking lots of water. The place was all concrete and full of twisty stairwells and Moorish windows that reminded me of medieval torture chambers.  I get lots of spam from PayPal pretenders unless I move the spam filter on my AOL mail way up, and then a lot of real mail gets blocked.

Finally, I turned 60 this week and was treated to a roast at Jeff Ubois's monthly digerati dinner in San Francisco. Everyone spoke about me as if I were dead, and told about all the good things I had done for them. It all sounded as if they were talking about someone else, like blurbs on the back of a book cover or the way you have friends pump up your ratings at Amazon or Linked In.  Dave Winer did pass through my I'm-not-dead-yet filter by saying that he never understood my business model, because I just do a lot of things for free, without any ulterior financial purpose.

And that got me thinking, do I even really have a business model for life? Figuring out how to make lots of money (more than I need) never seemed interesting to me. Blowing up townhouses and wars don't interest me either. Blogs are just the opposite -- they're for building ideas and worlds, along with lots of other technology offerings, like virtual worlds. That's why I use filters to filter what I want to see in my world.

Comments

[Robert Scoble]

I wish I knew you better. You're welcome in our home in Half Moon Bay anytime.

[Adele Aldridge]

Hey Happy Birthday Sylvia!

I found it interesting that you only just discovered that AOL is more like a moat than a portal. Every time I send a simple jpg graphic to someone and I get a return message that they didn't get it the person ALWAYS in on AOL. And years ago when I was living in the Bay area and attended a woman's computer club in San Francisco we had a speaker come from AOL. This was in the early days of the internet. The woman - can't remember any names here -- actually described the entire AOL system like a moat. She said, "You can't get in and you can't get out and they want it that way."

I so wish I could have been at your 60th birthday party. Don't those kids know that 60 is the new 40!

Birthday xxxx's

Adele

[Frank Paynter]

Happy-Happy Birthday! Here's hoping you never catch up with me. Because that would mean, that would mean... well, you know.